


how wonderful life is while you're in the world

by enragedbisexual



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gay, How Do I Tag, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, bc I said so, but then things jus get, it follows the story of the movie sorta, sorta (?)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:20:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26508106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enragedbisexual/pseuds/enragedbisexual
Summary: maria learns 2 cope with carol not remembering their relationship but she doesn't know carol has been getting back memories of the two of them ,, basically they're both jus. absolute gay disasters n it takes some time 4 them 2 figure out what's going on
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	how wonderful life is while you're in the world

**Author's Note:**

> im rly proud of this fic y'all. it means a lot 2 me 4 a bunch of rzns but yeah i jus ! enjoyed writing it & i hope u guys like reading it 🥺💓

The pain, Maria remembered, had once felt as heavy as the boxes they had carried into their first apartment, as sharp as her ex girlfriend’s wit. She remembered it being so overwhelming, so suffocating. _That’s what it would have been like for me out there,_ Maria often thinks, now. _Suffocating._

 _“Out there,”_ was Maria’s two syllable euphemism for a one syllable word that terrified her: space. Space—the infinite, alien world where Carol had been, while Maria was at home, lost and bitter and angry. And _achingly_ alone. 

She didn’t feel any resentment or anger of any kind when it came to Carol; she never could. And besides, in this case, she certainly didn’t have a reason to. Whatever Maria had been feeling all those years, whatever seemingly impossible struggles she went through, she knew Carol couldn’t have been doing much better. Part of Maria was grateful she didn’t know where Carol was that whole time, or what she had been doing, because if she had, god knows how much worse life would’ve been. It wouldn’t have only been her pain, it would’ve been Carol’s too. If she had known Carol was out there, somewhere, not with her? That they were both alone? It would’ve been unbearable. 

When Carol came back, though, Maria went through everything all over again. Except this time, it was—notably—worse. 

It didn’t start out that way, of course. For a few, fleeting seconds, in fact, it was the complete opposite. It was euphoria.

When Maria saw Carol again, after six years—six years of hoping and wishing and giving up and inevitably starting all over again—an inexplicable sensation had whirled through her entire being. The feeling was something that, to this day, Maria struggles to truly characterize or express. The only thing that even comes close to the way she felt on that day, is the way she felt on another, very different day, in the summer of 1984. 

That summer was vibrant, it was electrifying; it was karaoke nights that rescued them from distant, trepidatious days. And it had been on a particularly loud, dizzy night, after a particularly long and weary day, that Carol had kissed Maria for the first time. It was _that_ feeling, multiplied by a thousand. A million, even. That was what went rushing through her veins when Carol came back. 

_“Aunty Carol? Mom! It’s Aunty Carol!”_

Monica’s words felt cruel, at first, like the universe didn’t think Maria had suffered enough. But then Maria turned around, and she looked at Carol with her own eyes. Carol held her gaze, and suddenly Maria was the one who wasn’t really there. She was in the bathroom of a bar and she was nineteen and it was the end of July, and she had her eyes closed and her back against the door and Carol’s hand on her waist. That was the feeling. 

Just as soon as it had been given, the feeling was taken away. It disappeared bluntly, eerily reminiscent of the way Carol had disappeared six years ago. 

_“I’m not really who you think I am.”_

“Cruel,” at that point, was an understatement. A pitiful attempt to explain the sense of loss Maria felt, grasping at words that weren’t there, because of course they couldn’t be there, because _god why would anyone create a word for a feeling no one should ever have to feel?_

Maria asked herself that over and over. She was riddled with guilt, and she hated herself, and the world, and she couldn’t make sense of anything. To feel something other than bliss or gratitude when your _person_ comes back from the dead—it felt like she was committing an act of treason against every god there’s ever been. 

But Maria couldn’t help her devastation. Carol was back, yes. She was on Earth and she was alive, but she didn’t _remember_ anything. The only person Maria had ever been in love with didn’t even know who she was, let alone reciprocate the sentiment. Maria was technically truthful from the start; she did tell Carol that they were best friends, after all. She never lied, she just ... omitted some major details. What else was she supposed to do? 

_Hey I know you just got back to Earth and you’re pretty shaken up considering the whole you-don’t-remember-ninety-percent-of-your-life thing and also you can shoot blasts of energy from your hands now, but we were actually supposed to get married, so, is that still on the table?_

Please! Maria could never bring herself to say something like that, not even after Fury and the Skrulls, when life was back to some semblance of normalcy. This would take time. It was still too much to come to terms with.

* * *

Today, though, a little over a year after Carol saved the Skrulls, Maria was doing just that. She was past “coming to terms” and on her way to healing, actually. She knew Carol had been finding pieces of herself everyday (small pieces, but they fit just the same), and Maria couldn’t have been happier for her. 

Be that as it may, she wasn’t holding out hope for a miracle, anymore. One day, she and Carol had been looking at old photos, which they did all the time. It seemed to bring Carol real comfort, and Maria wanted her to feel safe. Glancing at a photo of the two of them in uniform, making silly faces at the camera, something in Carol’s eyes had flickered—a spark Maria had desperately hoped meant _I remember, I’m yours._

It didn’t. But instead of letting her spirit crumble, (like the Jenga towers they and Monica were always building too high), Maria forced herself to stop feeling so hopeless. It sounds insane, even as she thinks back now, but she managed to heal her deepest wounds in a short few days. 

All it took, truly, was a serious shift in her perspective. She had been feeling so cheated, like the universe didn’t care about her at all. She felt like she had been cosmically cursed, and she would get so _angry._ Plenty of days, she wouldn’t sleep at all, plagued by nightmares made up of her own memories. Maria was so focused on everything she didn’t—or couldn’t—ever have again, that she was so wildly unaware of the gifts she _had_ been given. 

At the end of the day, Maria decided, she was just happy, and lucky, to know Carol. She was lucky to have Carol in her life again. Any and everything she might have beyond that was a blessing. 

And she did have a lot, in fact. They didn’t kiss, or make love, or fall asleep together _every_ night. But they were incredibly close, Monica included; they were a family, if an unconventional one. Maria can’t count the number of times she’s fallen asleep with Monica’s head in her lap and Carol’s on her shoulder, or the nights Carol has come into her room shaken by a nightmare, and Maria has held her close and stroked her hair and whispered reassurances until her friend fell back asleep. 

When you fall in love with someone, and they never hurt you—things end on good terms, or maybe you never even got together in the first place—when you fall in love like that, it’s so hard to fall out. In the back of your mind, they’ll always be there, hanging around and showing up in your daydreams when you least expect it. 

You might move on, you might “get over” them, in theory, but in practice? If they showed up and asked to be yours, would you say yes? 

See, after some serious, and, yes—tearful—ruminating, Maria knew the answer. She knew it would never change. But she also decided she didn’t need _everything._ She didn’t need for them to be in love, whatever that even meant, and she didn’t want to waste her time on this Earth full of sad feelings. She wanted happy feelings, and she had them. 

_Forgive me for being a living cliche,_ Maria had pleaded jokingly, and to no one in particular, _but this is more than enough._

As for Carol, she _had_ been getting little pieces of her memory back: a fuzzy vignette of a family road trip she took as a kid, blurry frames of the day she first learned how to ride a bike ...

... A vision of two hands shaking as they interlaced their fingers, a flash of skin on skin and a fire in her stomach whenever she lay next to Maria for too long, _a jolt of energy as her lips pressed someone else’s to the offbeat of loud karaoke in a dark bathroom stall._

Okay, she hadn’t told anyone—she hadn’t told _Maria_ —about those last three pieces. 

First of all, Carol couldn’t even be sure of what was happening in her own mind. She obviously didn’t trust herself, or her memories, because she knew they had been toyed with before. And although it was, admittedly, a bit of a stretch to think that would be happening to her again, it felt more like leaps and bounds to think that she and Maria had been .... something. 

_So,_ she presumed, _the former it must be, then._

Carol shoved all her soft-edged pieces—a label designated for those memories which focused on the two of them—down and away from the big picture. They didn’t fit. 

Well, she wasn’t sure if they did. She hasn’t asked Maria about it. She was far, far too terrified.

* * *

Maria had been getting the strangest sense from Carol over the past few weeks. She wanted to ask her what was going on, but she didn’t want to make Carol feel bad or uncomfortable. Maria knew it wasn’t right, or reasonable, to think of Carol as being so fragile. She was one of the strongest beings in the entire universe; she could handle a question. Or two. 

Monica was at school, and Carol and Maria were sitting on the couch—close enough to touch but decidedly, not—watching reruns of Charlie’s Angels. An especially irritating commercial interrupted their viewing, leading Carol to quickly press MUTE on the remote. 

For a second, Maria was grateful. After all, they had seen this guy drone on about Chevy’s plethora of meaningless awards at least ten times over the past 24 hours alone, and it _was_ annoying. Except, now, the room was unnervingly quiet, save for a faint, steady buzz coming from their refrigerator in the other room. Under different circumstances, Maria wouldn’t be bothered at all by this sort of silence. She and Carol were perfectly capable of coping with lapses in conversation; in fact, they enjoyed it. At this exact moment in time, however, the lack of chit-chat was making both of them unusually anxious. 

They knew they needed to talk about the way things had been recently. Maria noticed Carol had been keeping more and more to herself, holding her breath whenever Maria got too close. For weeks, Maria had been dying to bring it up, always on the verge of unlocking whatever kept her from saying the things she was thinking, yet always swallowing the key in favor of swallowing her pride. 

Now, it’s been unlocked. _And there’s no going back,_ Maria concluded. 

“Carol, is everything okay?” Maria asked. She tried to be nonchalant about it, but you could tell it was anything _other_ than a casual question. 

Carol didn’t turn to face her, like Maria had expected. She kept her eyes on the television, the bright whites and blues of a new commercial flashing across her face in the dim light. 

“Yeah? Everything’s okay.” Carol made eye contact, now. “Why? Are you okay?” 

The first _yeah_ wasn’t a lack of conviction on Carol’s part. On the contrary, actually. She seemed confident, like she only made her voice go up in that inquisitive manner in order to ensure that her puzzlement with Maria's inquiry was properly expressed.

“I’m okay,” Maria said slowly, without breaking eye contact. A split second passed, and it was long enough for Maria to change her mind. 

Quickly, Maria admitted, “I’m sort of confused, to tell you the truth. Did I do something wrong? I feel like, lately, you’ve been acting like, I’m a ticking time bomb or something. I don’t know, I’m sorry, I’m probably just being-“

“No, no it’s okay,” Carol interrupted. She was looking at Maria, but Maria was looking away, as if she could literally see the words she didn’t get to say hanging in the air. 

“Hey,” Carol said, her voice more insistent this time. “Look at me, it’s okay.” Maria looked, her face a picture of relief and confusion. Carol was smiling softly at her. 

When Maria didn’t ask anything else, Carol knew she had to be the one to clear the air, even if she had approximately zero idea what to say. 

Carol plopped her hands down onto her jeans, over the top of her thigh, and audibly took in a breath. Her eyes, like her hands, were on the tattered blue denim she was wearing. She moved her hands up and down her thighs nervously until she stopped at the place she had began, shrugged her shoulders up awkwardly, and then exhaled as she closed her eyes and let the muscles of her upper body fall back into a relaxed position. Her head was still pointed towards their carpeted living room floor. 

Maria, chewing her lip in an attempt to tame the beast that was her anticipation, watched as Carol opened her eyes and turned to face her. 

As soon as their eyes were locked, Carol started, “I’ve kind of been keeping something from you.” She felt the guilt and the worry start to bubble up in her stomach. “I’m really sorry.” 

Maria didn’t seem shaken. Carol didn’t know what to make of that. 

Maria just sort of nodded, ever so slightly, and Carol realized this might be more of a monologue situation than she had originally anticipated. 

Nevertheless, she continued, “You know how I’ve been remembering stuff, here and there, and how we always talk about the stuff I remember? Well, I ... well. There’s just some memories, or something, that I’m not so sure about? I mean, I’m sure I’m _having_ them, like, I’m definitely seeing everything, I just don’t know if they’re mine.” 

Maria looked horrified. “You think someone got inside—is, inside—your head again?” 

“I don’t know,” Carol said. She felt so awful, making Maria worry like this. She had to come out with it. 

“No, I don’t think so,” Carol confessed defeatedly, heaving a sigh. “I’m just making excuses, I guess. I’m scared, Maria. Promise you’ll tell me the truth?” 

“The truth about what? I would never lie to you. You know that. And you’re scaring me. What’s going on?” Maria grazed the top of Carol’s hand with the tips of her fingers as she asked that last question, and Carol’s hand sprang up from the couch, startling them both. 

“Oh god, I’m sorry, I don’t know—I don’t know why I did that,” Carol explained hurriedly, trailing off at the end of her sentence. Maria just stared. 

“Look, I-I’ve been having these memories. Of us? Not how we are now but like, _us,_ Maria. Do you know what I’m talking about?” 

If the silence had been a grey cloud before, it was a full blown thunderstorm now. 

The look on Maria’s face was the same look she wore the day Carol arrived in their little suburbia. Carol didn’t know if that was a good thing. She wanted it to be. She really, really wanted it to be. 

Practically whispering, Maria leaned closer and said, “I ... can you—can you tell me more?”

Carol swallowed against the lump in her throat.

“Yeah, yeah, yes,” she assured. “Okay. Um, there’s a few. Sometimes, I see two hands trying to hold onto each other. They’re both reaching, and shaking, and then they intertwine their fingers ... I wasn’t sure what to think of that one. I thought to myself, _well that could be anyone._ But, that’s not true.” Carol delivered those details without facing Maria directly. Her eyes were staring off into space, like she was here, with Maria, but she was also somewhere else. 

“I know what my own hand looks like,” Carol explained, “I know what _yours_ looks like. I don’t know. I’m just afraid, I guess. I don’t know what to believe.” She looked a bit ashamed. “No, I’m-I’m afraid to believe. I’m afraid.” 

Maria lifted her hand off the sofa and reached up to press it against Carol’s left cheek, staying there for a moment, and then gently moving Carol’s face towards her own. 

“You don’t have to be afraid, Carol. I promise. Just take a breath, yeah?” Carol nodded, and visibly took the advice. “What else have you been seeing?” 

Carol began, “I see flashes of something, um.” She felt herself blushing, and she knew Maria would notice. It only made her skin hotter. 

“Yeah?” Maria encouraged her to continue. 

“You know how you said you’ve been feeling like, well, that _I've_ been making you feel like, a ‘ticking time bomb?’ I think-“

“I’m sorry,” Maria cut her off. “I’m sorry I said that, I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty-“ 

Carol didn’t let her finish. “No, no it’s okay. That’s not what—no. It’s okay.” She beamed at Maria, hoping to hammer home the statement, which was one hundred percent genuine. 

Then, she continued, “It’s just, I’ve been seeing us in bed. Together.” She sighed, and looked at Maria. 

“We’re not—in the memories we’re not—we aren’t ... sleeping.” 

By now, the tension was mounting, although it wasn’t necessarily uncomfortable. It just felt like a precursor to something inevitable, something important. Maria did have a bit of a knowing smile on her face, but she also looked hesitant, like she desperately wanted to do something and at the very same time was petrified by what that something might be. 

Well, love conquers fear, as they say. 

While their gazes were both locked onto each other, Maria leaned in and kissed Carol, quite quickly, on the mouth. 

It seemed as though the act was over in less than an instant, and yet every instant they had left on this Earth had now been forever changed. The trajectory of their lives was finally back on track. 

Apparently, Carol didn’t exactly appreciate the moment being so brief. She kissed Maria again, and unlike her friend, she didn’t show much restraint. Her hands were in Maria’s hair in less time than it had taken her to mute that commercial, and Maria had her knuckle in the loop of Carol’s blue jeans. 

Between kisses, Carol mumbled something along the lines of, “Hey, this is just like that night at the karaoke bar.” 

Maria pulled back instantly, her eyes wide. 

“You _remember_ that?” Maria asked, her voice full of wonder and awe. 

Carol grinned. “Yeah, babe. It’s been the only show on the Carol Danvers channel,” she said, tapping her index finger against her temple, “for, like, the past month.” 

Immediately, the room was filled with the sound of Maria’s laughter, then Carol’s too, and, eventually, another silence. 

This silence wasn’t intimidating. It wasn’t a storm, no. It was the clouds slowly dissipating, the way they do right before the sun comes back out to say hello. 

Both of their eyes were sparkling, their faces glowing and their hair lightly tousled. They looked like they could’ve been in a commercial themselves: “couple waking up and drinking coffee together in their pajamas,” or something. 

It was Maria who spoke first. 

“So,” she began “we’re ... _us,_ again?” 

Carol let the question bounce around in her mind for a few moments. 

“I can’t believe we ever _stopped_ being us, Maria. Let’s not let it happen again, okay? You’re my person. Always.” 

Carol laced their fingers together. Another memory come true. 

“If I remember correctly, we have one more memory to relive, don’t we?” Maria teased. 

With a disapproving click of her tongue, Carol replied, “Rambeau, always with your mind in the gutter.”

Maria rolled her eyes.

“Okay okay!” Carol said, “I’m just kidding. Come here, my love.” 

Maria was smiling so wide her cheeks hurt, and at any other moment with anyone else in the world, she would’ve been thinking about something incredibly ridiculous, like whether or not her smile made her look unattractive. Right now, here, with the girl she's loved since she was nineteen? She couldn’t have cared less.


End file.
